Barton House is a residential tower block in the Barton Hill area of Bristol, England. It is the city's oldest tower block and was officially opened on 23 July 1958. [1] [2]
Barton House is a residential tower block in the Barton Hill area of Bristol, England. It is the city's oldest tower block and was officially opened on 23 July 1958. [1] [2]
Barton House was constructed by 1958 at a cost of £315,744 (now more than £6.1 million). [2] [3] [4] Strengthening works and concrete repairs were carried out around 1970, but there were no records of any structural surveys between then and at least 2018. [5]
On 14 November 2023, Bristol City Council declared a risk of building collapse, ordering all residents to evacuate. [6] This was due to "major structural faults" being discovered. [7] Surveys at three of the 98 flats found there was a "risk to the structure of the block" in the event of a fire, explosion or large impact. [8] The structural issues are reportedly not due to reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC). [9] Around 400 people were told to find alternative accommodation. [10] The city council offered compensation to residents and temporary housing in a nearby Holiday Inn hotel, and payment of taxi fees resulting from the evacuation. On 28 November, it was revealed that the city council expected residents to continue payment of rent, allegedly for contractual reasons. [11]
On 10 January 2024, the city council announced that residents should be able to return to their homes in February, after work to secure the safety of the building started on 8 January. [12]
A tower block, high-rise, apartment tower, residential tower, apartment block, block of flats, or office tower is a tall building, as opposed to a low-rise building and is defined differently in terms of height depending on the jurisdiction. It is used as a residential, office building, or other functions including hotel, retail, or with multiple purposes combined. Residential high-rise buildings are also known in some varieties of English, such as British English, as tower blocks and may be referred to as MDUs, standing for multi-dwelling units. A very tall high-rise building is referred to as a skyscraper.
Ronan Point was a 22-storey tower block in Canning Town in Newham, East London, that partially collapsed on 16 May 1968, only two months after it opened. A gas explosion blew out some load-bearing walls, causing the collapse of one entire corner of the building; four people died and 17 were injured. The nature of the failure led to a loss of public confidence in high-rise residential buildings, and major changes in British building regulations resulted.
Cheltenham West is an area in the western part of Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England. It is the generic name for an area which includes the council wards of Hesters Way, Springbank, Arle, Rowanfield, Alstone, Fiddlers Green, St Mark's and some of St Peter's and the Moors.
Easton is an inner city area of the city of Bristol in the United Kingdom. Informally the area is considered to stretch east of Bristol city centre and the M32 motorway, centred on Lawrence Hill. Its southern and eastern borders are less defined, merging into St Philip's Marsh and Eastville. The area includes the Lawrence Hill and Barton Hill estates.
Broadwater Farm, often referred to simply as "The Farm", is an area in Tottenham, North London, straddling the River Moselle. The eastern half of the area is dominated by the Broadwater Farm Estate ("BWFE"), an experiment in high-density social housing, loosely based on Corbusian ideas, dominated by concrete towers connected by walkways, built in the late 1960s using cheap but fire-vulnerable pre-fabricated concrete panels. The western half of the area is taken up by Lordship Recreation Ground, one of north London's largest parks. Broadwater Farm in 2011 had a population of 4,844. The estate is owned by Haringey London Borough Council.
Barton Hill is an area of Bristol, just to the east of the city centre and Bristol Temple Meads railway station.
The Red Road Flats were a mid-twentieth-century high-rise housing complex located between the districts of Balornock and Barmulloch in the northeast of the city of Glasgow, Scotland. The estate originally consisted of eight multi-storey blocks of steel frame construction. All were demolished by 2015. Two were "slabs", much wider in cross-section than they are deep. Six were "points", more of a traditional tower block shape. The slabs had 28 floors, the point blocks 31, and taken together, they were designed for a population of 4,700 people. The point blocks were among the tallest buildings in Glasgow at 89 metres (292 ft), second in overall height behind the former Bluevale and Whitevale Towers in Camlachie, but still held the record for being the tallest inhabitable buildings and the highest floor count of any building constructed in the city.
The Lakanal House fire occurred in a tower block on 3 July 2009 in Camberwell, London. Six people were killed, and at least 20 injured, when a high-rise fire, caused by a faulty television set, developed and spread through a number of flats in the twelve-storey building.
The Cranbrook Estate is a housing estate in Bethnal Green, London, England. It is located next to Roman Road and is based around a figure of eight street called Mace Street. The estate was designed by Francis Skinner, Douglas Bailey and an elder mentor, the Soviet émigré Berthold Lubetkin.
Public housing in the United Kingdom, also known as council housing or social housing, provided the majority of rented accommodation until 2011, when the number of households in private rental housing surpassed the number in social housing. Dwellings built for public or social housing use are built by or for local authorities and known as council houses. Since the 1980s non-profit housing associations became more important and subsequently the term "social housing" became widely used, as technically council housing only refers to housing owned by a local authority, though the terms are largely used interchangeably.
On 14 June 2017, a high-rise fire broke out in the 24-storey Grenfell Tower block of flats in North Kensington, West London, England, at 00:54 BST and burned for 60 hours. Seventy people died at the scene and two people died later in hospital, with more than 70 injured and 223 escaping. It was the deadliest structural fire in the United Kingdom since the 1988 Piper Alpha oil-platform disaster and the worst UK residential fire since the Blitz of World War II.
Grenfell Tower is a derelict 24-storey residential tower block in North Kensington in London, England. The tower was completed in 1974 as part of the first phase of the Lancaster West Estate. Most of the tower was destroyed in a severe fire on 14 June 2017.
Samuel Webb was a British architect who was famous for his work on the structural and fire safety of Tower Blocks following his investigation into the Ronan Point tower block.
Tower blocks are high-rise buildings for residential use. These blocks began to be built in Great Britain after the Second World War. The first residential tower block, "The Lawn", was constructed in Harlow, Essex, in 1951; it is now a Grade II listed building. In many cases, tower blocks were seen as a "quick-fix" to cure problems caused by the existence of crumbling and unsanitary 19th-century dwellings or to replace buildings destroyed by German aerial bombing. It was argued that towers surrounded by public open space could provide for the same population density as the terraced housing and small private gardens they replaced, offering larger rooms and improved views, whilst being cheaper to build.
Chalcots Estate is a council housing estate on Adelaide Road and Fellows Road in Swiss Cottage in the London Borough of Camden. It was designed by Dennis Lennon and Partners. The Chalcots Estate was built on land owned by Eton College, which is reflected in the names of the individual buildings.
The Ledbury Estate is a large estate of social housing, in Peckham in the London Borough of Southwark. The estate is just south of the Old Kent Road, part of the A2 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) from both Tower Bridge and the Elephant & Castle it is adjacent to land used by George Livesey for the South London Gasworks.
Opal Tower is a residential tower located in the suburb of Sydney Olympic Park in the Australian state of New South Wales. It was completed in August 2018. The high-rise residential tower was built by Icon, developed by Ecove and designed by Bates Smart Architects. The building has 392 apartments, with 34 above ground levels and three levels underground.
The Barking fire was a structure fire that occurred on 9 June 2019 at a newly built six storey block of flats named Samuel Garside House, located in De Pass Gardens, Barking, London, the United Kingdom.
The United Kingdom cladding crisis, also known as the cladding scandal, is an ongoing social crisis that followed the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 and the Bolton Cube fire of 15 November 2019. The fires revealed that large numbers of buildings had been clad in dangerously combustible materials, comprising a combination of flammable cladding and/or flammable insulation.
The Freshwater Road fire was a fire that broke out in the Spectrum Building, a block of flats on Freshwater Road, Dagenham on 26 August 2024. Four people were injured and treated at the scene with a further two being taken to hospital. Comparisons were immediately drawn to the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire by several news outlets.